Bananas - bananahome.com

As more of my friends start looking into the NAS market, one of them told me about a real gem. Almost any old PC is enough to create a good NAS solution, with the help of FreeNAS!

FreeNAS is made to be easily installed on a USB stick, and run on a simple PC. It has a fairly good Web interface, with some really advanced options. The USB stick option is to make sure that you can utilize the available disks in the PC for data, without having to use one for the software. The disk where the software is installed, can't be used for data. The USB stick needs to be 2 GB only.

If you and your friend has a FreeNAS each, you can also set up replication/synchronization between the two, to keep data safe on another site. There is support for AFP, Active Directory, CIFS (Windows network), Dynamic DNS, FTP, LDAP, NFS, SNMP, SSH, TFTP and iSCSI. The important ones here are, of course, CIFS and FTP.

The installation was easy, and hassle-free. The configuration was mostly easy, but I stumbled a bit when trying to create user ID's. My tip is to leave the Home directory as default while creating the user, and change it afterwards. It needs to be changed if the user is going to be able to use FTP.

Security note: If you want to access your NAS over internet, do it wia FTP. Never, ever, open up your firewall for CIFS (Windows network) from internet!

FreeNAS is Open Source, and thereby free!

FreeNAS would work great with Cobian Backup.


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Researching a way for my mom to backup her files to a location outside her house, and doesn't cost "anything", I came up with the following solution:

Mom got a USB disk, which we placed at my home, connected to my FTP server. I set up an account for her, and set access to her USB disk. I installed Cobian Backup on her PC, and set up the relevant directories and files to be backed up on her PC. A shortcut on her desktop, and she's good to go. We completed the backup with another USB disk connected directly to her PC, so she'll have one backup at home, and one at my home.

Cobian Backup has a large selection of settings to make the most of your backup needs. The authors home page: CobianSoft

Cobian Backup is FreeWare!

Cobian Backup would work great with FreeNAS.


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I finally went ahead and created my first IdeaJam Idea, so please go and vote for it!




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I've decided on a registrar for bananahome.com. I chose No-IP. Why? Well, I already had a free account, with one host name for dynamic update of DNS entry. Now I can have it work even better, by having it update the domain directly instead. Since I'm on ADSL, without a static IP address, I think this can work out very well. I haven't seen much negative reviews of them either. We'll just have to see how it goes.



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I just got a mail from my registrar, telling me it's time to renew my domain for another year. This reminded me that I was going to look for another registrar to move my domain to.

My current registrar is Yahoo, and I'm not quite satisfied with them. They are comparatively expensive, without giving more value. Their DNS control panel is not very user friendly. I  have a hard time finding it on their site when I need it, since I don't use it very often, and they're a bit too close to M$ to fit in my comfort zone.

My needs arent very big. I need a good, user friendly, DNS control panel, but not so user friendly that it becomes unusable. A competitive price. Some kind of support would be nice, and of course a low problem ratio. I don't want any kind of web or mail hosting.

I looked at a couple of registrars, but thought I'd get some feedback from you all before making a decision. What registrars do you use? Are they any good? How is their pricing? Can you recommend them?

Please let me know what you think.


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There has been a bit of interest in the Notes.Net Sandbox that I wrote about in my last entry, and also a couple of people that wanted to download the complete nsf. Well, here goes: To the right, under "Other stuff", are the links to the Sandbox. The first one to the HTML version here, and the other one to the zipped nsf file. It's about 1.6 GB in size.

Enjoy!


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I just noticed that the Sandbox on Notes.Net has finally been closed. I know it was announced a long time ago, but still... I think it's too bad that it's closed down, since there're still good examples in it for new developers. Since I replicated it from Notes.Net, I thought I'd put it up here at BananaHome.com, for anyone that'd like access to it. Even if I don't expect a big rush for it, I'm a bit concerned about the bandwidth to my server. It's located on my private ADSL broadband link. I'll just have to see how that goes.

The application is unchanged from when I replicated it, so it doesn't look exactly the same as it did when it was hosted on Notes.Net. None of IBM's supporting CSS, JavaScript or images is contained in it. I might change the look of it later, but for now, I'll just publish it as is. If anyone is interested, I have the unmodified nsf saved, so if anyone would like a copy of it, just let me know. It's a 1.8GB file uncompressed.

Access the Sandbox here.


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